


fed with cold and usurous hand

by inkandcayenne



Category: True Detective
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-24
Updated: 2014-07-24
Packaged: 2018-02-10 04:24:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2010816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkandcayenne/pseuds/inkandcayenne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Family, yeah. Part of the problem with Rust was there was things he needed he couldn’t admit to.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	fed with cold and usurous hand

**Author's Note:**

> Previously posted on Tumblr. Comments are much appreciated!

> _Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body … . The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!”  On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable_.  -1 Corinthians 12

i.

He doesn’t remember.  

He thinks maybe— _maybe_ —he remembers an ice-cream cone, and music playing.  The shore?  He knows he remembers her skirt, red-and-yellow checked, gathered up in his tiny fist.  There’s practically nothing that’s ever happened to him that he’s ever forgotten, even when he’s barely got two brain cells left to rub together, but he can’t remember anything more of her than that.   He wonders sometimes if that was the last time he saw her, or whether there was nothing at all special about that day.

He remembers  _remembering_  more than anything—the first cold nights up north, the way he turned that warm memory over and over in his hands like a stone.

She’s an empty space that makes up half of him, whatever’s in him that isn’t his father, and every time he falls short of his pop’s almighty apocalyptic vision he wonders if that’s his mother in him—not the cold, clean part like the northern night sky but something in the murky depths struggling to surface: his hottest, most humid self.  

ii.

Years later and a good six months after the fact, Marty will laugh his fool ass off over Papania and Gilbough pegging him for the Yellow King (it’s not funny to Rust—no one would ever accuse a good old boy like Marty of being a serial killer, but Rust has never  _fit_  the way Marty does)—and how they went so far as to call up along the North Slope borough, following up on the leukemia story.  “Said no one had even seen him in thirty years.  I reckon they think you killed him and ate him, or something.”

He feels a laugh, the first real one in years, rising and then guttering in his throat.  Shit, like that proved something.  Like anyone had hardly seen him around before that.  He dropped off the map completely when Rust left Alaska; he had been the old man’s last tenuous link to the world, and he suspects he resented him for it.  Kids keep you tied to things.

iii.

Rust is  fastidious.  White sheets pulled tight over the mattress, lawn chairs folded neatly along the wall.  Only five shirts, three pairs of slacks, two sportcoats, but he keeps them neatly pressed.  Even later, at the lowest points, his clothes are wrinkled and unkempt but always clean.

He’s just three days on the job when Lutz bumps into him one morning and coffee goes everywhere, stain spreading across his white shirt.  His eyes bulge and his nostrils flare and he thinks for a moment he’s going to throttle the man, but if you’re going to kill someone, in the middle of a room full of homicide detectives—even incompetent sonsofbitches like these—probably isn’t the best place.  Lutz and Geraci and the rest stare back at him warily and Rust is suddenly aware that the trial period of his new coworkers not being sure whether they hate him or not has officially come to an end.

“Hey.”  Hart, exuding fatherly patience, puts a hand on his shoulder and doesn’t react when Rust jerks back.  Gestures towards the break room with his own, more carefully held coffee cup.  “There’s a sink back there, you wanna get cleaned up.”

He stands over the running water and scrubs at the stain with a paper towel in his shaking hands and tries not to think about being ten, in the restroom of their tiny rural school, trying to get icy mud out of his trouser-cuffs.  Knowing they whisper about crazy old man Cohle in the ramshackle cabin outside town, and his kid, the weird one, the skinny, hollow-eyed boy in worn-out clothes, whose dad only gets him to school about one week out of every month.  He can’t keep them from calling him weird but he won’t let them call him dirty.

The dirt won’t come out, though, so he cuts class and ducks into the library.  It’s quiet there, and warm, or at least less cold, and the other kids leave him alone there.  When he sees Travis pull up in his mucus-green pickup he hides in the stacks, and then hates himself for hiding.

iv.

Folks around here don’t care much for his pop, but that setup he’s got out in the woods provides most of the community’s cheap liquor, and anyway here in the bush most people tend to keep out of each other’s business.  Someone always talks, though.  The cops show up for the first time when Rust is five.  They don’t find the still, but they’re concerned about the state of the house, with its rough-hewn walls that don’t quite line up right and the small wood stove whose warmth only seems to radiate about three feet.  

“I know you think you can live off the grid, Travis,” the cop says.  “But you got a kid and that makes you part of things now.”

Travis is sharpening one of his knives, something that probably passes with him as a subtle threat.  “He’s fine.  We don’t need no one.”

The cop crouches in front of Rust.  He’s ruddy-faced, light-haired, bright-eyed.  “You know where the station is, son?”

Nod.  He knows where everything is.  His pop makes sure.

“Your old man ever does anything funny, hits you, or if you ain’t getting enough to eat or it gets too cold, you come down to the station, hear?”

Nod.

He knows, even then, that by the time it got bad enough for him to ask for help it would be too late, and the station’s too far away to walk anyhow.  Still, he clings to it, turns the possibility over in his mind on nights it’s so cold that he’s lost track of his limbs.  A buffer against starvation and hypothermia.   A safety net.  

Years later, he finds out that the blond-haired cop died about six months after he visited the Cohle place.  Fell through the ice.

v.

Claire and Laurie are different as night and day, id and superego, thick black eyeliner and Ikea placemats, but one thing they had in common was the way they bitched about how hard it is to sleep with Rust.  Not to fuck him (although that comes with its own unique set of challenges) but to share a bed with him:  _why can’t you just lay flat like a normal person_.

Even before Crash, before North Shore, before those early days in Louisiana when he felt like he had to tread carefully across the earth or all his joints would come undone—he always slept in a rigid ball, arms locked tight around his knees.  It was the closest thing he ever got to warm.

vi.

He worries sometimes about what would happen to him if something happened to his pop.  He has exit strategies mapped out.  If it happens while he’s at school, the borough will take him and place him with a family.  There will be electricity and running water and they’ll make sure his clothes are always clean.  He will enjoy the comfort, and he will hate himself for it and leave as soon as he can.  If it happens while he’s at home, he’ll start the twenty-mile walk into town and hope he doesn’t freeze before he gets there.  Best-case scenario, it happens while they’re out in the woods.  He figures he can become one of those feral kids he’s read about.

When it does happen, though, Rust is five thousand miles away and warm, and Travis is dead for awhile before anyone finds him.

vii.

He reads a lot, whatever he can get his hands on.  His pop doesn’t buy him books (there’s not much money in the Cohle household, other than what Travis brings in off that shit he brews out back) but he doesn’t care much that Rust steals them, either.  He hides them all the same; never know what’s gonna set him off.  He found Engels once and Rust thought the old man would beat the shit out of him.  After a fortnight of the silent treatment, he started to wish he had.

viii.

The night before his last day of high school, he gets drunk enough to work up the nerve to tell the old man about his full ride to TAMU.  His pop is drunk too and there’s a rip-roaring fight, fists thrown, walls rocked on their foundations.   _Figures. Leaving me just like she left you.  You never did have any goddamn loyalty._

He takes his last final with blood dripping out of his nose onto the page; the teacher looks the other way, glad to finally be rid of that weird Cohle kid.  He gets into the rusted-out piece of shit he bought fourthhand with his own money and heads south, and doesn’t stop until snow finally starts melting off the windshield.

ix.

It’s humid and bright and everyone’s fucking  _smiling_ , and the shock of matriculating with fifty thousand people after a lifetime of never knowing more than a hundred at a time is too much.  He returns to his dorm room and has what he later understands is his first panic attack.  He remembers this feeling from before, of not being able to breathe, but only when it was so cold it felt like the air was being pressed out of his lungs.  It makes no sense, here, in College Station, in August.  He misses his father suddenly, violently, like a fist squeezing his heart.  He just wants to hear his voice again, that voice full of gravel and sangfroid:  _buck up, kid.  You’ll be fine.  You always are._

But his pop doesn’t own a phone— _who the hell would I want to talk to on a phone_  ( _me, for starters, you selfish fucker_ ), so over the succeeding months Rust writes letters, hundreds of them.  Sometimes they’re answered.  Sometimes the replies even make sense.

x.

He never knew more than ten or twelve girls his own age growing up, and they’d never wanted much to do with him outside the occasional hurried, drunken encounter.  The girls in Texas respond differently.  There’s a girl named Claire who dyes her hair black even though it’s already dark brown and pesters him for his Intro to Philosophy notes when he knows perfectly well she takes notes in class, and another named Nora who keeps glaring at Claire across Rust’s desk and trying to borrow his pen.  For the first time he becomes aware that something about the way the bones are arranged in his face, the way his hair curls over his forehead just so, has a certain appeal.  He’s perplexed at first, and then comes to resent it—it’s one of the reasons, later on, for the tiny mirror.

The sharp cheekbones, the wide, sleepy eyes are Travis’s.  He guesses the curls must be his mom’s.

xi.

The study abroad trip was awarded to the student with the best paper.  He’d written his essay on Camus at three a.m., high, the morning before the deadline.  He’s contemptuous enough of everyone at the university in general and the French department in particular that he almost turns it down ( _don’t ever take any fucking handouts, kid_ ), but he knows that the only way that a guy like him will ever get Europe is if someone else is footing the bill.  Maymester in Paris: room, board, and two courses.  He chooses French Existentialism and a random history course, mostly because it accommodates his hangover schedule.

He passes the Notre Dame every day on his way to class, and the more he sees it, the angrier he gets.  

Construction on the cathedral began in 1163 and completed in 1345, he learns in the history class on the days he’s sober enough to attend.  During that time: the rise of the feudal system, the expulsion of the Jews, the beginning of the Hundred Years War, the Black Death creeping westward like a cancer.  Nine-tenths of the population peasants, their lives uncertain and endangered—like his own had felt, sometimes ( _you’ll eat when you’ve killed something, kid_ ).

He stares at the hulking structure, rising up over the river like a silver-gray skeleton, and if he squints his eyes through the mist rising up off the water he imagines he can see them—countless workers, crawling forward through the centuries, scurrying over the framework of the cathedral like ants.  Wielding chisels, stacking stone, blowing glass, melting iron—dangerous work.  Falling into firepits, being crushed by falling rock. Countless more growing the crops and feeding the livestock that kept those workers alive, wearing out the soil generation after generation.  An endless expenditure of effort and labor and skill and fucking  _creativity_ —he can’t say the sonofabitch ain’t beautiful—and for what?  For popes and priests and princes who had the audacity to point to it and say, “look at what I made”?  For a god arrogant enough to demand flying fucking buttresses?

He imagines what it would be like—to lose your hold up there, fingers scrabbling helplessly against the newly-placed bricks.  No harnesses or hardhats, no OSHA in the thirteenth century.  No fucking safety net.  Losing your foothold and screaming all the way down, with fuck-all to catch you.

And so he sits in front of the Notre Dame, and he drinks, and he thinks about futility, and tries not to think about the fact that if he can’t be happy in fucking Paris he’s not likely to be happy anywhere, ever, and he’s glad when the month is up.

He’s surprised to see Claire standing at the gate when he gets back.  They’d agreed that whatever happened while he was away was something neither one needed to know about, and he’d only thought to send one postcard.  He’d figured something better would come along in his absence.  Yet there she is, looking oddly washed-out and nervous.

“I’m late,” she says, before he has a chance to kiss her.

xii.

“You ain’t gotta do this, you know.  I mean, I could find the money—you could—”

“I can’t do that.”

For a moment he’s so angry that he can hear his heart pounding in his ears.  So stupid of him to not realize that,  for all her pseudo-punk posturing, she would revert back to that trailer-park Bible-belt nonsense as soon as things got tough.  “Why the fuck not?  You didn’t seem to be too concerned about Jesus when you were fucking me in the back of my truck.”

She puts out her last cigarette and averts her gaze.  “That’s different.  Some things you can be forgiven for and some you can’t.”

He feels trapped, like that time he was seven and he fell through the ice (Travis standing over him, alert but impassive:  _you know what to do, kid_ ).  He looks at Claire and can feel his vision clouding, his hands going numb; looks at her and doesn’t know her: the familiar eye makeup worn away, the sharp-jointed limbs, usually set at cocky angles, now folded around her like a pile of brittle twigs.  He could walk away, now, in this moment.  It would be easy.  But he can’t leave his kid.

They marry at the courthouse, and then he swings by campus to pick up his diploma, and then over burgers at Wendy’s he tells her he’s enrolling in the police academy.

She’s skeptical, to say the least; many of their shared activities have not been legal ones.  She actually drops a fry into her ketchup.  “What the hell for?”

“I wanna help people.”

“Since when?”

 _Since I watched peasants falling off the Notre Dame and the only decent cop I ever knew went through the ice_ , he doesn’t say.

xiii.

She tosses the book across the room.  “There’s too many fucking names, man.  I can’t decide.  We’ll just call her Jane Doe.”

“I’m about to become a cop, Claire, you can’t fucking name our daughter Jane Doe.”

“Well, then,  _you_  name her.”

He settles on the threadbare couch next to her.  “I was thinking, actually—Sophia.”

“What was it, your mom’s name?”

A tight-lipped shake of the head.  

“It’s pretty.  Sophia.”

“It means ‘wisdom,’” he says.  “You know, like in  _philosophy_.”

“Whatever,” she says.  “You’re a nerd.”

xiv.

Claire is the picture of stoic patience, and the sitter, an elderly woman with three children and five grandchildren, exudes that sort of calm beneficence that seems to hypnotize most children.  It doesn’t work on Sophia, though: when it’s time to go down for her nap, she screams, struggles, kicks her legs.  Except with Rust.

He’s still nervous, after a year, every time he picks her up; and yet somehow his anxious heartbeat, his stiff-legged pacing back and forth across the nursery, matches Sophia’s own jagged internal rhythms.  He hums tunelessly and feels her head settle against his shoulder, her hand curl around the back of his neck.  

She’s the only person, as far back as he can remember (not even his pop:  _you’re a weird one, kid_ , as if he had any fucking room to talk), who’s ever been completely comfortable around him.

xv.

When he gets home there are cops and an ambulance and Claire at the edge of the driveway and he keeps saying  _what happened, Claire, what the fuck happened_  but there’s no logic to her answer, wide crazy eyes and a nonsensical string of words, and it reminds him so much of how Travis used to get some nights after too much rotgut that Rust thinks for a moment he’s going to be sick.  He shakes her, hard, and then finally she chokes out  _she’s gone, she’s gone_

and just like that: she’s gone.  In her place an emptiness he will spend the rest of his life building things around.

xvi.

He’d looked at her one day, not long after her birthday, and realized  _two, she’s two now, the same age I was, the same age I was when my mom, the same age as, the same_ , and it gets stuck in his head for a minute, a feedback loop.  He realized what it would mean, if he’d left before or left now, that she would be the one left trying to fashion a picture of him out of half-formed memories—half of her missing, the way half of him was always missing.  The realization is a block of ice that sits on his chest and won’t melt for weeks.  

And that’s why he can’t leave, after, even though he knows then what he always knew, that she was holding them together, her chubby, sticky little hands the only link between Claire and himself, between himself and the world.  Kids keep you tied to things.  And now he is untethered.

It would be merciful to leave her now.  And he tries, he does.  Stays away for three, four, five days at a time, ingests things he doesn’t even know the names for until he can’t remember what Claire’s face looks like half the time.  Goes out for cigarettes night after night and tries to stay gone.  But he can’t.  The checkered skirt flashes at the back of his vision like strobe lights, now yellow, now red.   _You never did have any goddamn loyalty_.

In the end, it’s easier for Claire.  He stumbles home one morning and every trace of her has been wiped away: clothes, makeup, cassette tapes.  Only Sophia’s things are still there.

xvii.

They’re blonde instead of brown-haired and fair instead of olive-complected, but the older one is just the age she would have been. While her younger sister whispers behind her hands she eyes him askance, with a look of half-annoyed perspicacity he recognizes from Marty.  He can’t imagine what he looks like to them, their father’s new partner, this whiskey-breathed cadaver hovering over the spaghetti.  _You’re a weird one, kid_.

The first time, what feels like fingers wrapped around his throat is:  _your life’s in this man’s hands, right? Of course you should meet the family_ _._   It’s a burden he doesn’t want, being responsible for a husband and a father rather than just another partner, and anyway he’s 98% certain he doesn’t even like this guy.

The last time, what feels like an ice-cold fist squeezing his heart is: _it wasn’t you. He’ll have to go, you see, because this he won’t live with_. It never occurred to her that maybe he wouldn’t take his complete and total irrelevance as a fucking  _compliment_.

It was never about anything but Marty, keeping him or getting rid of him.  Rust is merely a cog in their machine.

xviii.

He never knew there were so many goddamn types of flour.

He’s got to get back to his apartment.  Marty’s back there, drinking up all his whiskey and getting up to God knows what.  It’s getting late, the store’ll be closing soon, he’s gotta get back and measure and weigh and package this shit so he can exchange it for the coke in the morning.  All he’s gotta do is grab a sack of flour and he can leave.  All he’s gotta do is  _pick one_.

King Arthur, Gold Medal, White Lily, Pillsbury, Martha White, Hodgson Mill.  All-purpose, self-rising, cake, bread.  Lining the shelves like stocky little soldiers, waiting to march.  They’re all so fucking  _white_ , a bright white glare under these fluorescent lights as if lit from within by some malignant source, stenciled with delicate flowers and smiling mothers, aggressively selling their fantasy of affluent white domesticity.  He feels dizzy and wonders if it’s real.  Not affluent white domesticity, he knows that’s not real, the flour, it’s so fucking gleamingly pulsatingly white that he’s not sure if it’s not another hallucination.  If he’s taken to hallucinating flour he’s gonna be really pissed off.

This is not his area of expertise.  Travis Cohle could track, kill, dress, and cook any living thing that crossed his path, and he could cobble together a decent stew from the summer garden, but he didn’t bake.  When Rust was ten, his pop taught him how to drive the truck, and from then on he was the one who made the twenty-mile trip into town once a month for bread and powdered milk and canned vegetables.  Pilot bread, because that shit would last just about forever.  He can’t remember now what it was called.  Blue-and-white box, with a little boy in a sailor suit.

A little old lady with a cart full of butter and chocolate chips and vanilla extract  is scowling at him for blocking the aisle, but this is his territory now and he ain’t backing down.  The baking aisle is his Alamo now, his Port Houston.   _On ne passe pas_.  Anyway, it’s not like he can say  _‘scuse me, ma’am, which one of these fine products bears the most resemblance to high-grade Colombian_ _?_   No, they’re just both gonna have to wait and see how this one plays out.

Claire didn’t bake, either, though she tried once, their first Thanksgiving as a family.  30 hours straight on a string of jewelry store robberies and he gets home to find carrots in a sodden mess sticking to the bottom of the pot, Sophia in her high chair screaming, and Claire weeping over a pile of blackened shapeless things that might have started off life with the intent of becoming rolls.  

The second Thanksgiving she called him at the station and asked him to pick up rolls on the way home, the kind that come out of a bag and go straight into the oven.  There was never a third Thanksgiving, as it turned out.

He’s knocked out of his reverie by the sudden realization that _the blue-haired old bitch has just rammed him in the ass with her buggy._

Crash has been working his way up ever since he got that call from Marty and now he can  _feel_  him, vibrating just below the surface, making the flesh on his face tighter, his lips narrower, cheekbones more prominent.  One look and he knows the old lady sees it, too.  Her self-righteous smirk dissipates like rain on the road on a hot day; she mutters an apology and steers the cart around him.

“ _Attention, shoppers.  The Piggly Wiggly will be closing in ten minutes.  Please bring your purchases to the front of the store_.”

Shit, shit,  _shit_.  He’s actually sweating.  He’s shot people who knows how many times without once dithering over it this much.   _Get it together, asshole_ , and for once the voice in his head isn’t his pop’s, it’s fucking  _Marty’s_.  

Which, baby steps, or something?  Whatever.  He reaches out, hand not shaking ( _no, not much, not much at all_ ) and grabs the first bag that his fingers brush across.

He makes a detour to the cough-syrup aisle on his way out.

xix.

He isn’t even surprised, really.  Annoyed—Christ, this is gonna be  _such_  a pain in the ass to deal with—but it’s Marty all over, isn’t it?

“Get the cuffs off before his blood settles; we gotta make this look right.”

Afterwards, there’s a caution in Marty, a holding of breath, that stretches out into days and weeks as they get their story straight, rehearse it, and then recite it again and again and again.  A child expecting to be scolded, waiting for the reprimand that doesn’t come:  _you stupid sonofabitch, you should have known better than to shoot an unarmed suspect, don’t you know what can happen to you if you pull that shit?_   But Marty’s overwhelming need for confession and absolution always bubbles out sooner or later, and one night, six months down the line, the two of them alone in the car—“Don’t know what came over me, that thing with Ledoux.  Ain’t sorry about it, though.”

He glances over at Rust, twice, a third time, searchingly, and Rust just wants to tell him to keep his eyes on the fucking road, but Marty’s always had this weird thing where he’s silently, resentfully convinced that Rust is the smarter of the two of them, and he’s not gonna let this go until Rust tells him he made the right call.  

Which he can’t.  But he thinks about shooting the tweaker, the way it felt like a bright spot of triumph in the midst of that jagged-edged brain-howling nightmare, like he was scraping something ugly out of the world.  He thinks of that boy in the Beaumont projects, the one he told to get in the tub.  The way the kid looked wary but not really scared, a worn-down look that’s too familiar. 

“Shit, I don’t know, Marty.”  He digs a cigarette out of the pack.  “Don’t really see how it coulda gone down any other way.”

“I think it was best for her, anyway,” Marty says, a little desperately.  “For the girl.  Not to have to go through a trial, or anything.”

The hospital said that she hasn’t spoken a word since they carried her out, doesn’t make a sound except for the screaming.  Rust watches his reflection light the cigarette against the darkened window.  “Like hell.  She’s already broken, Marty, it don’t make much difference.”

“Then what’s the point of trying to help, then?  Of— of trying to  _protect_  them?”  A note of panic is rising in his voice and he knows Marty’s thinking of Maisie and Audrey, now.

Rust blinks against the sting of smoke.

“I reckon we gotta,” he says finally, “just ‘cause  no one else ever fucking does.”


End file.
